Scribbles and Horrors

Last weekend I attended my very first gaming con, Dragonflight 46, and had a great time. I hosted 2 games each of Nomic and The Realm of Yolmi, and played in 3: Bunnies and Burrows and some Story Games.

Here are my experiences game by game:

Nomic

I had scheduled 3 4-hour games of Nomic, one each day. Nobody signed up for the Friday one, so when I arrived I cancelled the event to play B&B. This ended up being a good decision, but it was a valuable lesson in not over-committing to just one game.

Just one person signed up for Saturday, which made me somewhat anxious, but I decided to run it anyway. I was able to get an awesome and lovely game going with a “new players wanted” sign. One of the wonderful thing about cons, I’m realizing, are the virtues of just being in a place with a lot of people who play games and have set aside time to play them. The main rule which broke things was the “you must look directly at the Provost while submitting your proposal,” rule, which prevented things from passing. Win by points at a reasonable time, about an hour before the scheduled end.

Sunday had a lot of signups and went smoothly. Doodle contest. Very rules-friendly–managed to convince the gorup of a reading of the rules which made /all/ votes count towards rule-changes, which I’m surprised I got away with. Silver spoon suggestion. Low scoring, win by time pressure.

The final rulesets/gamestates for these games I will add later.

Bunnies and Burrows

I cancelled my first Nomic game in order to play Bunnies and Burrows with Scott Robinson, one of the authors. I haven’t written too much about it, but B&B is a really important game to me. It completely changed the way I understood these games. It was really great to see how Scott ran things; we avoided some hostile sheep, travelled through the forest and got in some hot water with some stoats (was able to use the bite+hold, rip combo to great effect), were unable to communicate with an armadillo and the squirrel who translated seemed to be trying to scam us, hitched a ride into a human market, tried to find the Markrket witch, a human who could speak to rabbits. After some shenanigans we got out of the market, fleeing across a bridge while being shot at by some humans.

There was no hex grid on the larger map, but we were able to navigate it step by step pretty well, with random checks along the way. I felt like the adventure sagged somewhat once we got to the market–as a party we kept trying to hatch schemes that were a little too complicated, at a little too close a resolution.

I think part of this behavior was due to the GM replacing the larger region map with a smaller market one; s players our scope of action changed to one that was slightly more granular (let me go to that stall, there), which made actions like “I try to steal a cabbage” seem insufficient. In any case, the adventure was a success

The Score and Fiasco

During my breaks between scheduled games I wandered into the Story Games Lounge and played two games of The Score and one game of Fiasco. I don’t think I like story games very much. Both of them focused on something like genre emulation, and their approach with prompts were not the sort of thing that I found creatively inspiring to roleplay.

Still, it was fun to hang around a table and my fellow players were excellent, so I had a good time.

The Realm of Yolmi

I ran two sessions of The Realm of Yolmi, Escape From Special Operations Complex #903, which I had run on Discord months earlier. The scenario heavily relies on novelty and surprise (The Realm of Yolmi itself, the Zeta map, the Creatures), and it worked well for both games. All three times I’ve run it, SOC #903 has taken around 90 minutes to complete. This could be modulated by adding water challenges or teleportation traps.

Since I already wrote a detailed session report here, I’ll summarize the differences of each successive group:

The Friday group was 4 strong, and pretty much immediately found themselves on the map. They crawled up a vent straight into some True Ones, who charged through the vent attacking. The party got in a lot of lucky hits, but True Ones are way too fucking strong, so lost 3. Going another way, the group ran into the scientist Polixia Grouse who warily directed the party to a room with quik-rafts in it, however they had to pass through the Galic room. The galics (as on discord) were not unfriendly, but did shake off an arm. The party took rafts up the big passage, and noticed a door which led to the politicians lair. Listening to the politicians and then escaping.

The Saturday group was 8 strong, and only lost 1 character to some (uncharacteristically hostile) Galics. The pattern of progress was almost identical to the Friday group, except they met no True Ones and made an unlikely ally of the grumpy Marshall. It took a little longer for the Saturday group to locate themselves on the map, but they figured it out within 30 minutes.

Something I wish I had done better for The Realm of Yolmi is to take a minute before play to play players through their character sheets. All of the players were great sports about it, but it did happen several times that aspects of the game which i know weren’t ones they knew. In the second game, for instance, people were somewhat confused by descending armor type and misunderstood my pregen sheet ammo notation. It’s very reasonable to be confused by that, and it could have been avoided with a few sentences at the beginning.

One actual regret I have is I spent a lot of time writing Pre-generated characters which I was quite proud of. I had planned to scan all of these before the con and release them on itch, but I didn’t end up having time. As a result, the players took away the original copies. This is a good thing–art is inherently ephemeral, and should be shared–but I do wish I had been able to make time to save my work. I can always make new ones, though.

Overall thoughts

My main aim was to see what cons are all about and share my niche interests. Both succeeded–at least one person each game I hosted expressed interest in investigating Nomic or Yolmi on their own.

It turns out I like cons, or at least, I liked this one. The development of D&D makes a lot more sense, seeing how a community of people-who-play-games can operate. There was just a lot of good energy.

I like structured social interactions. I liked spending all day wandering around a hotel and having a big schedule that told me where to be at particular times. Everyone at the con was friendly, gracious, and more or less eager. Really, excellent.

I will definitely try to make it to more, more Nomic, more Yolmi, and perhaps some other games as well. I’m interested in taking advantage of the con space/time to run more multi-player games I have kicking around; Diplomacy, some hex and counter stuff.